Welcome to Law School Employment Statistics!

Hi! Welcome to the blog Law School Employment Statistics, designed to examine the employment prospects for law students and law graduates, given all recent press and blog coverage of revelations that law school is a scam and a terrible, dire financial disaster for a large percentage of law graduates, possibly the majority. You may be in the top 10% of law grads and make lots of money at a big firm, perhaps miserable with the work environment, or be among the other 90% of students with $100,000 to $200,000 worth of non-dischargeable student loan debt who will not be able to find a job, or who will get a crappy $30,000/yr 80-hour a week attorney job which won't cover the huge loan payments, or get a terrible contract/doc review temp position, jobs which are paying less and less and are being outsourced to India in increasing numbers.

I know of many graduates of top law schools who have never been surveyed by their school about where they work/what field/how much they make. And I think law school employment stats don't typically state the number of graduates in the class if discussing a particular class, and the number of graduates who actually filled out the survey. First of all, we can all guess that better-off graduates might be more likely to respond to such a survey than those broke and living with their parents. And for example, if 10 out of 100 actually fill out the survey, that's not a representative sample, and any such survey is inaccurate.

If that's the case, if the statistics are obviously inaccurate because of low response rate and schools not even consistently surveying graduated students, could stating such misleading/inaccurate "averages" rise to the level of fraud, and if school financial aid offices get kickbacks from student loan companies, could this be tied into a charge of deceptive lending? Here are some more buzzwords: unconscionable, predatory lending, and FTC. Take note: there was recently an article in the New York Times about class actions against trade schools for perhaps fraudulently luring students into debt with no career prospects, so why not in the legal education field too? So, send in any law school employment statistics materials you can find!

Another idea to think about is building a fund, perhaps forming a nonprofit, and buying lists of students who take the LSAT each year (law schools do this, this is how you get "free tuition" offers from Tier 3 and 4 schools if you do well on the LSAT). Then instead of sending the students free tuition offers and promotional materials for low-ranked schools, we would send them materials warning about the low job prospects and theoretical, non-practice orientation of law school that will spit students out with no real skills that will realistically pay off their $100,000-$200,000 student debt unless they are in the top 10% of all students, and even then they have to be lucky/know someone/etc. We would send real articles and studies, LA Times and NY Times articles on the topic etc, not just blog gripes. I think that would wake schools up, to know that there is a group or nonprofit out there sending real employment prospect information.

Another idea is soliciting film-makers (Michael Moore, shoot us an e-mail!) to do a documentary on this. People made a stink about subprime mortgages, making loans to borrowers who realistically would not be able to pay back their loans, the same thing has been happening with law school financial aid offices approving private financial aid to law students who realistically would have no real prospects of paying back their huge loans given the bad job prospects and lack of practical job skills taught in law school. We should get someone like Michael Moore to document the new subprime education bubble and possible bust. People can walk away from their underwater real estate and mortgages, but not their underwater higher education degrees and student loans. It's going to be a real drag on innovation and our economy--how can students innovate when tricked into useless degrees and held down by $100,000-$200,000 in student loans. Talk about being sold a false bill of goods. It's not like students are dumb, but have been taught to trust education--students need better information, better labeling, truth in advertising, a wake-up call.

Please send all scanned images of law school employment statistics fliers/pamphlets from law schools, for example if you have any of the left over application/promotional materials from schools you applied to, or send weblinks to any statistics law schools put on their sites, to lawschoolstats@gmail.com.